Microsoft's announcement, on Monday, that it would purchase LinkedIn--its biggest acquisition ever, at more than twenty-six billion dollars--brought to mind an earlier takeover attempt, almost a decade ago. Back in the mid-aughts, Microsoft's C.E.O. at the time, Steve Ballmer, flew to Palo Alto to try to convince Mark Zuckerberg, the young C.E.O. of Facebook, to let Microsoft buy his company. During Facebook's first couple of years, bigger companies had dismissed it, and social networking in general, as a fad for college kids; Zuckerberg had even admitted that he didn't care how Facebook would eventually make money. But Ballmer, who wanted to catch up to Google in the online-advertising business, was beginning to see Facebook's power. People were signing up for accounts in extraordinary numbers.

Taxpayers spend 39 billion a year on jailing 2.3 million people, making the U.S. the country with the highest incarceration rates in the world. And while technology is radically reshaping every aspect of our economy and society, none of our advances in computing and data are helping to stem the tide of mass incarceration. At a workshop in the capital last Tuesday, White House senior adviser Lynn Overmann of the Office of Science and Technology Policy called on the technologists of the country to figure out how to use data and technology to end widespread incarceration, according to Government Technology. Overmann wants artificial intelligence and machine learning programs that improve screening processes, scan body camera footage for police misconduct and make sentencing more fair. "I represented a client who was looking at spending 40 years of his life in prison because he stole a lawnmower and a weed-eater from a shed in a backyard," she said.

We've seen some incredible applications of Deep Learning with respect to image recognition and machine translation but this particular use case has to do with public safety; in particular, how Deep Learning can be used to fight crime in the forward-thinking cities of San Francisco and Chicago. The cool thing about these two cities (and many others!) is that they are both open data cities, which means anybody can access city data ranging from transportation information to building maintenance records. So, if you are a data scientist or thinking about becoming a data scientist, there are publicly available city-specific datasets you can play with. For this example, we looked at the historical crime data from both Chicago and San Francisco and joined this data with other external data, such as weather and socioeconomic factors, using Spark's SQL context. We do the data import, ad-hoc data munging (parsing the date column, for example), and joining of tables by leveraging the power of Spark and then publish the Spark RDD as an H2O Frame (Figure 1).

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

SAP SE is exploring augmented reality and intelligent assistant software in initiatives intended to boost employee productivity, according to new SAP CIO Thomas Saueressig, who at 31 is the youngest CIOworking for a global 2000 company. More productive employees will ultimately improve the business software maker's ability to serve customers, one of the German company's core tenets. "I fundamentally believe that the new generation and the expectations of our customers and our employees are changing so significantly," says Saueressig, who took over for Helen Arnold on May 1. "And we need to shift our focus purely on the end-user [employees and customers]." Saueressig is something of a rarity among first-time IT leaders. As a millennial, he is a member of a generation HPE CEO Meg Whitman describes as as supremely confident if not entitled.

Inspired by the biblical concept of the seven days of creation, our group sought to create a dystopian science-fiction retelling that put a spotlight on the possibility of AI evolving and eventually supplementing the role of God. Based on the assumption that artificial intelligence would learn at an exponential rate, we wanted to make sure that the actions taken by Deepmind would progressively escalate day after day. The fundamental distinction however was that Deepmind would not share the same sense of human empathy- something that led to its destructive actions in the later days. Overall, we let the readings discussed in class form the individual plot points of the specific days (automation, love & robots, fully automated luxury communism) whilst still taking certain creative freedoms. Additionally, a key point is that the seven days of creation may not be literal 24-hour days but a figurative expression which we then incorporated into our timeframe of events within our version of AI's seven days of existence.

As more information continues to pour in about what happened at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, here's what we know about the shooter, Omar Mateen. The logo of Jack'd, an online dating and chat app for gay men. According to some reports, Orlando shooter Omar Mateen used the app to message men in the months prior to the shooting. SAN FRANCISCO -- The CEO of Jack'd, a Tinder-like gay chat and dating app, says he hasn't been contacted by law enforcement since reports surfaced Tuesday that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen might have been using the app for at least a year. The site also hasn't been able to substantiate that Mateen had been a member, said Hector Camacho, CEO of Jack'd parent company Online Buddies.

Apple has a plan, of course. Looking back, it's clear what that is. So when the iPhone 5s came with a fingerprint sensor, it seemed like a useful, convenient feature. But really it was just a precursor to a bigger function: Apple Pay. Apple keeps its plan secret and reveals a little bit at a time.

The logo of Jack'd, an online dating and chat app for gay men. According to some reports, Orlando shooter Omar Mateen used the app to message men in the months prior to the shooting. SAN FRANCISCO -- There are reports that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen had been using a gay chat and dating app called Jack'd for at least a year before his assault at a gay dance club left 49 victims dead and 53 wounded on Sunday. However the company that runs the app says it can't find profile information and that police haven't contacted them. According to the Los Angeles Times, Mateen, 29, had messaged at least one regular Pulse patron sporadically over the past year using the Jack'd app.

This includes the future of messaging, photos, maps, and more. Apple's Photos app will create automatic folders and videos from your work (Photo: Jefferson Graham) SAN FRANCISCO -- Apple spent two hours at the WWDC developer conference updating us on enhancements for mobile devices, computers, the Apple TV set-top box and the Apple Watch. The new software enhancements will be available for us in the fall. Apple's Photo app has hundreds, if not thousands, of photos taken by us, and locating them is a chore. So in a nod to rival Google Photos, Apple is going to use machine learning to use facial recognition to organize faces and identify places.